Monthly Archives: June 2010

As the great British architect Norman Foster turns 75, he talks to Jonathan Glancey about flying cars, his new underground city – and how he beat bowel cancer.

### guardian.co.uk Tuesday 29 June 2010 21.31 BSTNorman Foster at 75: Norman’s conquests
By Jonathan Glancey
“The other day,” says Norman Foster, “I was counting the number of aircraft I’ve flown: from sailplanes and a Spitfire to a Cessna Citation. By chance, it comes to 75.” So Foster, who turned 75 this month, has decided to make models of all 75, to hang in his own personal museum, which he keeps at his Swiss home, an 18th-century chateau set in vineyards between Lausanne and Geneva.
These model aircraft will hover over his collection of some of the 20th-century’s greatest machines, cherished for both their engineering brilliance and streamlined beauty; many of them look like winged or wheeled versions of Foster’s most innovative buildings. “At the moment,” says the architect, “I’m restoring a Citroën Sahara, designed to tackle north African dunes. I’m also thinking of getting a Bell 47 helicopter as a focal point. And I’ve had a model made of the Graf Zeppelin airship.”
The subject [architecture] is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it’s an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics. Every time I’ve flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I’ve learned something new that can be applied to buildings.Read more

### ODT Online Wed, 30/06/2010 – 9:49am.
Comment by Kiwi-Lass on Outrageous parking restrictions
The council have become greedy in their parking fines. My mum lives at the north end of George St, down by the gardens and she’s been ticketed for parking outside her own house, for stupid reasons. Now she is being told that the council are going to make all of George St no parking and that she will need to buy a residential parking permit, which at no stage will guarantee that she will be able to find parking. This is crazy. She owns the house in which she lives in and pays the yearly city council rates – should this not mean that she is entitled to park outside of her house?

### ODT Online Wed, 30 Jun 2010Event managers show interest in stadium
By Hamish McNeilly
Dunedin is set to benefit from the lucrative conference and event industry, with the Forsyth Barr Stadium attracting interest from both sides of the Tasman. The yet-to-be-completed stadium was one of 170 companies marketed at Meetings 2010, an annual trade show held in Auckland last week, attracting buyers and sellers involved in the $1 billion industry.

Tourism Dunedin chief executive Hamish Saxton said the stadium, coupled with the refurbishment of the Dunedin Centre, had “generated plenty of interest with buyers”.

### D Scene 30.06.10Kicked into touch (page 1)
Grassroots rugby fear their voices might not be heard as plans to redevelop Carisbrook – the home of the game in Dunedin for more than a century – are laid out. See p3. #bookmark

Supporters feel left out (page 3)
By Wilma McCorkindale
Otago rugby supporters are miffed they appear to have been shunned in discussions over the future of Carisbrook. The Otago Rugby Supporters Club and the Southern Rugby Club are anxious about their own futures after a stakeholders’ meeting held at the historic Dunedin ground on Monday night.
{continues} #bookmark

Chin defended the lack of invitation to the Southern Rugby Club, and said organisers did not have a brief of ideas that would be proposed at the meeting.

Light industrial park proposed (page 5)
Carisbrook should be developed into a light industrial park, Farra Engineering chief executive John Whitaker told a Carisbrook stakeholders meeting on Monday night. Whitaker said land on the Taieri that had been put aside by the Dunedin City Council for industrial use was too remote from markets, suppliers and networks.
{continues} #bookmark

The trust believed the property would be most suited as a light industrial park within which the heritage structures and some of the field would be retained.
-Owen Graham, New Zealand Historic Places Trust

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Tourism campaign ‘disappointing’ (page 3)
By Wilma McCorkindale
A campaign supposed to turn Dunedinites into local tourists has disappointed the Dunedin City Council (DCC).
{continues} #bookmark

“It didn’t have the success Toursim Dunedin were hoping for. A flop would be a harsh way to describe it – but not the success we thought, yeah”
-John Bezett, DCC economic development

Biz: Crunching the numbersRoom for one more (pages 13-14)
Bunnings believes there are plenty of home handymen and gardeners to go around, as the hardware chain prepares to challenge its competitors head on in South Dunedin. Mike Houlahan reports.
{continues} #bookmark#bookmark

The 12,500 square metre shop – believed to be the fourth-largest Bunnings Warehouse in the country – is now scheduled to hold its grand opening on July 7.

1. Time to check what an individual’s business agenda might be.
2. In the interests of balance, ODT shouldn’t have privileged the views of one planning professional in the story.

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### ODT Online Tue, 29 Jun 2010Carisbrook for sport and build on Bathgate Park, meeting told
By Chris Morris
Carisbrook would be retained as the home for sports fields in South Dunedin and Bathgate Park developed for new affordable social housing under a proposal floated at a meeting in Dunedin last night.Read more

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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

Where’s the FULL background information pack that would normally prompt consultative practice – the Mayor can’t skip the requirement on Dunedin City Council to provide this.

Bathgate Park isn’t owned by the Dunedin City Council. The Park isn’t in the equation for Carisbrook’s future.

### thetyee.ca 25 June 2010Vancouver’s Architectural RevivalBehind the shiny surfaces there is a public logic guided by City Hall policies.
By Adele Weder, TheTyee.ca

[Editor’s note: This is excerpted from A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Vancouver, just published by Douglas and McIntyre. A second excerpt on Vancouver as ‘supermodel,’ by Matthew Soules, runs next week.]

On Aug. 7, 1971, officers on horseback charged into a crowd in Gastown, the original downtown core of Vancouver, and swung their batons at the thousand people who had gathered or wandered there to protest marijuana laws and the nefarious police tactics used to enforce them. At the intersection of Abbott and Cordova, marchers and onlookers were beaten or hauled into paddywagons and the public gathering soon transformed into what became known as the Gastown Riot, one of the most notorious brawls in the city’s history. In the years that followed, the neighbourhood withered, its zoning geared towards the tawdry tourist outlets that would long dominate it, its days as a gathering site all but over.

Making architecture is, at its core, a political action. Implicit in the design approach is the decision to encourage or thwart public gatherings, nurture or displace the poor, ignite or asphyxiate street life, rabble-rouse or calm the streets for paying visitors. At first glance, the shiny newness of central Vancouver suggests a manifesto of clarity and order, a divergence from the fiery social consciousness of decades past. (To sample that sensation, comb through the photo essay of buildings accompanying this essay.)

Underlying these images of finesse and resolve, however, are backstories of complex negotiations between public and private interests whose endgame is the greater public good. With increased density allowance as the currency, the resulting deals have spawned an unprecedented array of community centres, daycares, parks, public art and social housing.

Gastown’s current robust and widely inclusive revival owes much to City Hall — the very institution that had sanctioned the police bullying and subsequent neighbourhood stagnation in the first place.Read more + Images + Blog Comments

–Adele Weder is a Vancouver-based architectural writer and curator, and co-author of the Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Vancouver.